Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic

Map 2. Iceland

maP 2. iCeland 38 iCelandiC landsCaPes Danish-owned monopoly trade, which Hannes regarded as highly disadvantageous to Icelanders.13 According to these Icelandic authorities, the late eighteenth century was a period of great natural and social crisis in their country. During the nineteenth century, one group of Icelanders looked back at this period of crisis and argued that the blame for it should be laid at the feet of one entity: the Danish government, and in particular the Danish-monopoly trading company. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Danish government had been confronting environmental problems in various parts of the kingdom, including sandstorms and soil erosion in the Jutland peninsula and deforestation on the island of Zealand.14 Furthermore, the impoverished conditions in Iceland had already been the subject of a land commission investigation in 1770–71. The official response to the news of the Laki eruptions was both long- and short-term: aid was sent from Copenhagen and an investigative body was appointed to recommend a course of action. The central recommendation of the land commission of 1785, the last of the eighteenth-century commissions on Iceland, was that the monopoly trade, which had been instituted in 1602, be lifted and trading opened to all the subjects of the Danish kingdom, including the Icelanders.15 This company had been put into place primarily to break the hold of the Hamburg merchants —members of the strong Hanseatic trading league centered around the northern German cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck—on Icelandic trade. Denmark had also prohibited the export of Icelandic products to Hamburg in 1620. During the period of the Danish monopoly, from 1602 to 1787, only between twenty-two and twenty-five merchants were licensed to trade in Iceland, each with a fixed trading post served by one or two boats. Both Danish and Icelandic officials had criticized this trading system for its inflexibility and inefficiency even before the Laki eruptions. Many of the criticisms appeared to be justified after the catastrophe, since the monopoly company’s boats sailed to Iceland in the summer of 1784 without carrying any additional food supplies but still exporting the regular quota of fish from the island.16 Although news of the crisis had reached Copenhagen in September 1783, the system was so slow that the decision to send extra food to the Icelanders was not made until late July of the following year, and a collection in the churches in the other parts of the kingdom for the relief of the Icelanders was not begun until 1785.17 The land commission ’s recommendation thus fell upon receptive ears, and the decision was made to abolish the monopoly company in 1786. iCelandiC landsCaPes 39 But another outcome of the Móðuharðindi, one much less direct and less noticed by historians of this period than the economic and political results, was its contribution to the discovery of Iceland as a site of scientific investigation. Volcanic upheavals were of immediate interest to European geologists investigating the origins of the earth. Ironically, the very changes in the landscape that caused the Icelanders so much distress came to be considered the most attractive to European explorers. After 1783, travel books about Iceland devoted considerable space to describing the new landscapes and speculating about the composition of rock formations caused by these lava flows. Some travelers found these sights ugly, barren, and desolate, although scientifically intriguing. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, these barren landscapes began to be reevaluated in the more positive terms of Romanticism as majestic and awesome. Furthermore, panoramas created by fire and ice were considered to be the most characteristically and uniquely Icelandic vistas; these visions were the very objects of the travelers’ quests. Far from seeking to restore Iceland to the condition it might have been in before these upheavals, the upheavals themselves became the defining essence of Iceland and its so-called unique nature. Elsewhere in the Danish kingdom, as in other European countries, eighteenth-century agricultural improvers tried to alter barren landscapes in accordance with their standards of beauty by using stone walls, clover, and beech trees to create garden environments.18 In the North Atlantic, where such efforts had little effect, there was a gradual redefinition of what a “beautiful” landscape was.19 Many of the early reports of the Laki crisis reified an image of “Iceland as hell,” as the island had been portrayed in...